Bangkok Bob and the missing Mormon

by Stephen Leather

  The girl who’d said ‘Tukkata’ nodded. ‘He was always reading.’

  ‘Just because you read doesn’t mean you’re lonely,’ I said.

  ‘He didn’t talk to the other teachers,’ said the boy with gelled hair.

  ‘So he didn’t have many friends?’ I asked, looking at the girl who’d said ‘Tukkata’.

  She shrugged but didn’t say anything.

  ‘He didn’t talk to the teachers, but was he friendly with the students?’ I asked.

  The girl smiled but didn’t say anything. The boy who’d been using his cellphone came back into the room, scowled at me and flopped down onto his chair.

  ‘Enthusiastic,’ said Kai.

  I wrote ‘enthusiastic’ on the board.

  ‘Was he a good teacher?’ I asked.

  Several of the girls nodded. I wrote ‘good teacher’ on the board.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Let’s play a guessing game. Let’s see if we can guess where Khun Jon has gone.’

  I stood there with the marker pen in my hand, smiling encouragingly.

  Twelve faces looked back at me, blankly.

  Just when things were going so well.

  CHAPTER 20

  As soon as my hour was up I went into see Petrov’s secretary and asked her if there was a student at the school with the nickname Tukkata.

  ‘That would be Somchit Santhanavit,’ she said.

  ‘Is she in school today?’

  The secretary tapped on her computer keyboard, then shook her head. ‘She should be.’ She frowned. ‘She should have been in your class today.’

  ‘She wasn’t. Do you have a list of pupils?’

  ‘It’s not your regular class,’ she said. ‘You probably won’t be teaching them again.’

  ‘I know, but if there’s a problem we should know about it.’

  ‘What sort of problem?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe there isn’t a problem. But shouldn’t we know whether or not the pupils are in class?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Don’t you have a roll call each morning?’

  ‘We’re not a government school, our pupils don’t have to attend.’

  ‘But you must know who’s in each class to check that they’ve paid.’

  ‘The pupils pay each term in advance. If they don’t choose to attend after they’ve paid, that’s up to them.’

  ‘Which regular school does she attend?’

  The secretary told me. It was the same as Kai’s. Tukkata must have been from a good family.

  ‘Maybe I should phone, check that everything’s okay.’

  ‘There’s no need,’ she said. She looked at the clock on the wall. ‘Don’t forget that you have an eight o’clock class,’ she said.

  ‘I’d feel happier, knowing that she wasn’t ill.’

  ‘She isn’t one of your pupils,’ she said.

  It was clear from her tone that she wasn’t going to budge. I wanted to know why she’d lied about Jon Junior working in the school despite the fact that he still had a locker in the staff room but I knew I’d be wasting my time. So I smiled. And I left.

  The end of my teaching career.

  I don’t think I was a great loss to the profession.

  Or vice versa.

  CHAPTER 21

  Khun Wichit was a portly man in his early fifties wearing a neatly-pressed white shirt with oval gold cufflinks and a blue silk tie. His hair was thinning and flecked with dandruff and he had a large mole under his left nostril. I introduced myself and handed him a business card. I had spoken to two female secretaries and a male assistant and waited in a corridor for the best part of an hour before getting into Khun Wichit’s office.

  ‘I’m not sure what it is you want from me, Khun Bob,’ he said.

  That was understandable. I’d spoken to all his subordinates in rapid English and pretended to misunderstand virtually anything they’d said to me. If I’d used Thai they’d have come up with a million and one reasons why I couldn’t talk to their boss. But rather than admit their inadequacies with English, they’d passed me up the food chain. Sometimes it paid to be the idiot farang. But there was no point in playing that game with Khun Wichit. His framed university diploma was on the wall behind him and it was from Bangkok’s Assumption University where courses were taught in English.

  ‘I need some tax advice.’

  Khun Wichit took out a pair of gold-framed reading glasses, perched them on his stub of a nose, and frowned as he studied the business card.

  ‘You are an antiques dealer?’ he said eventually.

  ‘That’s right.’

  He placed the business card on his desk like a poker player revealing a winning ace. ‘We are tax collectors, Khun Bob,’ he said softly. ‘For advice you require the services of an accountant.’

  I nodded. I knew that.

  And I knew that information held by the Tax Office was confidential.

  So I lied.

  I told Khun Wichit, graduate of Assumption University with a second class degree in Information Technology, that I was looking for an English school for a friend’s teenage daughter and that I wanted to make sure that the school I recommended was a reputable one.

  Khun Wichit’s frown deepened.

  ‘I thought that one way of checking that a school is reputable would be to see that if it was paying its taxes,’ I said. ‘One hears so many stories these days of schools interested only in making a quick profit,’ I said. ‘I want to ensure that the school that my friend’s daughter attends is a responsible one.’

  Khun Wichit nodded slowly. ‘That is admirable,’ he said. ‘It may be that I can offer you some assistance in that regard. What is the name of the company?’

  ‘The Betta English Language School in Sukhumvit Soi 22.’

  ‘Betta?’

  I spelt it for him. He frowned. ‘What does it mean, Betta?’

  I shrugged. ‘It might be a way of spelling Better,’ I said. ‘Or they might have mis-spelled Beta.’

  ‘Beta?’

  ‘Alpha, Beta, Gamma.’

  ‘Why would they spell it incorrectly?’

  ‘By accident, maybe.’

  ‘It is confusing.’

  ‘It is,’ I agreed.

  There was a computer on a side table next to his desk and Khun Wichit carefully adjusted his cuffs before pecking at the keyboard with the index finger of his right hand. He peered at the screen, tutted, and then pecked at the keyboard again. He smiled in triumph as a spreadsheet appeared on screen and he studied it for almost a full minute before nodding to himself.

  ‘Everything is in order, Khun Bob,’ he said. ‘The Betta English Language School has been registered with us for the past three years and they have been most prompt in paying their taxes.’

  I smiled easily. ‘That is good to hear,’ I said. ‘So there is nothing untoward, nothing that my friend should be concerned about?’

  ‘I wish that all companies were as diligent as this one in filing their tax returns,’ said Khun Wichit.

  ‘I wonder if it would be possible to have a copy of that file,’ I said. ‘So that I could give it to my friend. Just to show him how reputable a school his daughter would be attending.’

  ‘Quite impossible, I’m afraid,’ said Khun Wichit. ‘The Data Protection Act prohibits the sharing of our database with members of the public. The information we collate has to remain confidential.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘But I wonder if perhaps the payment of a fee might facilitate the process. The information would remain confidential, of course. It would only serve to reassure my friend that his daughter’s education is in the hands of reputable people.

  ‘How much of a fee were you thinking about?’ he asked.

  I smiled amiably as I looked him over. Assumption was a private university and while it wasn’t the best in Bangkok it wasn’t the cheapest which meant he came from a reasonably well-off family. His shirt had a Ralph Lauren logo on it and it looked like the gen
uine article. His watch was gold but not a make that I recognised and was probably plated. He wore a simple gold wedding ring but there was nothing simple about a Thai wife. On the desk was a framed photograph of two small boys in dark blazers. Private education wasn’t cheap in Bangkok. No photograph of the wife but he didn’t look as if he was taking care of himself so maybe there was a minor wife somewhere in the building. Minor wives weren’t cheap.

  The trick was not to offer too little so that he wouldn’t be offended. But there was no point in overpaying. There could be a negotiation, but only if my first offer was somewhere in his ballpark.

  His smile was as amiable as mine as he looked me over. What did he see? A Rolex Submariner that was scarred and chipped from twenty years of diving. A cheap suit that I’d had knocked up by an Indian tailor in a Sukhumvit backstreet for a couple of thousand baht. The material, a wheat-coloured linen, was fine but the stitching was suspect and I’d had to ask the tailor to redo some of the stitching around one of the buttonholes. Expensive shoes because I never scrimp on footwear but they were under the desk so he couldn’t see them. A hundred baht haircut, a hundred and twenty if you count the tip.

  ‘I thought perhaps a thousand baht,’ I said, as if I was thinking out loud. Probably equivalent to a day’s salary.

  His smile tightened a little.

  ‘Two thousand?’ I added quickly.

  He looked at his wristwatch.

  Message received.

  ‘Three thousand?’

  A pained smile. Close, but no cigar.

  ‘Five thousand?’

  ‘That sounds satisfactory,’ he said. He opened the top drawer of his desk and passed a pale green file over to me. He looked at me expectantly. I took five one-thousand baht notes from my wallet, slid them inside the file and gave it back to him. The file disappeared back into the drawer. He hit a few keys on the keyboard, then gave me a curt nod. ‘Please, I shall only be a few minutes.’

  He left me alone in the office. I looked at the clock on the wall as it ticked off the seconds, wondering if he was going to return with the police and I was going to end up sleeping on the floor of a Thai prison for the next five and a half years. When Khun Wichit returned he didn’t have Bangkok’s finest with him but he did have a computer print-out which he gave me with a knowing smile. ‘If there is anything else I can do for you, don’t hesitate to call, Khun Bob,’ he said. ‘I am at your service.’

  I’d overpaid.

  You live and learn.

  CHAPTER 22

  The specialist that Doctor Duangtip sent me to see was a kindly-looking man in his late fifties with greying hair and metal-framed spectacles with round lenses. I waied him as I walked into his office. He seemed momentarily confused at being waied by a farang but he waied me back half-heartedly, then stood up and shook hands. His hand was as dry and cool as a lizard. Mine was bathed in sweat and I wiped it on my trouser leg as I sat down. His name was Doctor Wanlop and he was, according to Doctor Duangtip, one of the most experienced intestinal cancer specialists in Asia.

  There was that word again.

  Cancer.

  Doctor Wanlop had more certificates than Doctor Duangtip, but his were all from Thai institutions. Like Doctor Duangtip he had a computer on his desk and he tapped on the keyboard and studied the screen for several minutes before turning to smile at me.

  ‘My colleague explained about CEA?’ he said, peering over the top of his spectacles. He spoke in English, which was fine with me.

  ‘He said it was a marker for…’ I hesitated. I didn’t want to say the word. I wanted to use something less final. Something I could tell my wife.

  ‘For colorectal carcinoma,’ he said.

  Whoa there, hoss. That sounded a hell of a lot worse than cancer. Colorectal carcinoma? Where had that come from?

  I took a deep breath. I didn’t want my voice to tremble when I spoke. ‘For cancer, he said.’

  There. I’d said that. The world didn’t end. The sky didn’t fall in. But I didn’t feel any better.

  Dr Wanlop smiled. It was a reassuring smile, a smile that told me not to worry, that he knew what he was doing, that he would cure me of whatever ailed me. My heart was pounding like a jackhammer. The heart of a twenty-five year old.

  ‘Carcinoembryonic antigen, to give it its full name, was used as a test for cancer of the colon for a few years, but I’m not convinced that CEA levels are a valid marker for tumours,’ he said.

  That sounded hopeful. It sounded a hell of a lot more hopeful than colorectal carcinoma. And he was smiling reassuringly. That had to be a good sign.

  Right?

  ‘In fact, I can say with confidence that of the last twenty people who passed through that door with elevated CEA levels, not one had a tumour.’

  I frowned. ‘But Doctor Duangtip said that CEA was an indication that there was a problem.’

  ‘It can be. And it’s only right and proper that he had you come and see me. But I don’t think you should worry too much. These days we tend to use CEA more as a treatment marker. If after we’ve carried out a procedure we get a sudden elevation in CEA, then we know that our procedure has not been effective.’

  Thais aren’t great at breaking bad news. In the old days, when they’re going to execute a criminal, they hid the machine gun behind a sheet. The condemned man didn’t even know that he was going to be shot until the bullets ripped through him.

  Doctor Wanlop was certainly making me feel a lot better, but I wasn’t a hundred per cent sure that he was just sugar coating his diagnosis to stop me worrying. Maybe he just wanted me to feel better, right up until the moment that the cancer ripped through my guts.

  ‘So what happens next?’ I asked.

  ‘We should have a look inside,’ he said. ‘Reassure ourselves that there isn’t a problem. Assuming that we don’t find anything, we will know that you have a naturally high level of CEA.’

  ‘An operation, you mean?’

  ‘Not exactly. We can put a very small camera inside your intestines. We give you a small injection, just to relax you.’

  Right.

  Fine.

  That doesn’t sound so bad.

  Not really.

  ‘And you’ll do that for me?’ I asked.

  Doctor Wanlop smiled and shook his head. ‘I used to, but I’m too old these days,’ he said apologetically. ‘You need nimble fingers, and a lot of practice. I do so few these days that it takes me forever. But I can recommend a colleague who is an expert in the technique. She can do the entire procedure in less than thirty minutes.’

  She?

  A woman was going to run a camera through my intestines?

  Interesting.

  CHAPTER 23

  There are all sorts of rumours about Big Ron. One is that he once lost more than two hundred pounds on a crash diet. Grapefruit and tomato, or something like that. He lost weight so quickly that his skin hung around his waist and down to his knees like a deflated Zeppelin. A local surgeon cut out three square feet of skin that Big Ron had made into lampshades that now stood either side of his specially-reinforced bed. Then he started eating again and the weight was back on within a year. I don’t know if that’s true or not but sometimes when he’s drunk and the Fatso’s Fools are in full mad mode, he’ll lift up his enormous t-shirt and show off the scars across his stomach and hips. They look as if a great white shark had bitten out huge chunks of his skin. That’s what he says happened, scuba diving near the Great Barrier Reef. I’m not sure I believe that any more than I believe about the lampshades. Big Ron’s more of a floater than a swimmer.

  The other big rumour about Big Ron was that he was almost taken hostage by Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War. The first one, with George Bush Senior running the show. The one that didn’t end in an absolute disaster. Big Ron, so the story goes, hid out in a disused water tank on the top of his apartment building in Kuwait City, only leaving at night to go downstairs for food. Three months he was there, and he only left when
the Americans moved in. Big Ron was chief accountant with one of the big Arab banks. The Iraqis had looted the main branch before running home, but when Big Ron gets there he finds that the Iraqis hadn’t been able to open one of the vaults. Big Ron still had the key on his key chain and he opens the vault to find ten million dollars. The story is that Big Ron filled two suitcases, drove to the airport and flew straight to Bangkok. True or not? Only the Shadow knows. But Big Ron bought Fatso’s from a former British publican who wanted to swap the bright lights of Bangkok for the seedy underbelly of Pattaya and he did it with cash, by all accounts. And he bought himself a nice two-bedroom condo, again with cash. True story or not, Big Ron has never been short of money and he has one of the best financial brains I’ve ever come across.

  There were only a handful of tourists sitting around the bar when I pushed open the glass door. Young guys with shaved heads and tattoos and t-shirts with wittily amusing slogans like ‘I FCUK FOR ENGLAND’ and ‘SOD OFF, I DON’T NEED ANYMORE FRIENDS’ and ‘MY MOTHER LOVES ME, LET’S HOPE MY DAD DOESN’T FIND OUT’ and half-drunk pints of lager in front of them.

  I smiled at Bee and she pointed upstairs as if she’d read my mind. She hadn’t, of course, she was just being typically Thai, anticipating my needs and meeting them without having to be asked. She knew I wasn’t a daytime drinker and it wasn’t lunchtime so the fact I was there meant I wanted to see Big Ron, and Big Ron was where he usually was on a Thursday afternoon, in the upstairs restaurant sitting at a back table, going through the Fatso accounts.

  I went up the spiral staircase. I heard the tap, tap, tap of ebony balls before I reached the upper landing. Big Ron doesn’t use a computer. Won’t even touch a calculator. Doesn’t believe in them. He does all his calculations on a hundred-year-old abacus that he claims he won in a Mah Jong game in a Kowloon brothel. I’m not sure I believe that. Sure, I can picture Big Ron in a Kowloon brothel, but his hands are way too big to hold the tiny Mah Jong tiles. But the abacus is the real thing, polished rosewood frame with gleaming brass dragons at either end and black ebony balls on thin brass rods and Big Ron uses it effortlessly. And he’s fast. Fast and accurate.